Marketing Tips for a Successful Holiday Season

There are 10 weeks left until Christmas. Scary, considering we are deep in the Halloween season and trying not to think about winter, let alone the holidays. However, if you’re a business, now is the time you need to be thinking about it. Since it is still spooky season, here are some frightening statistics:

Roughly 41% of people have already started their holiday shopping. This is most likely to get ahead of the rush for in-demand items as well as to stretch out tight budgets.

About 65% to 71% of consumers start theirs before American Thanksgiving. Others have their game plans set to get the most bang for their buck with Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Yes, even in Canada.

76% of adults tend to make purchases during the weekend before Christmas (Super Saturday). Far be it from me to judge people who enjoy crowds and the disappointment of items they need being out of stock.

Approximately 5% to 51% of people wait until Christmas Eve or even Christmas Day to purchase presents. About half of this group admits to delaying major or final gift buys until the absolute last minute. Does anyone else feel anxious about this?

This is the prime time to get your holiday marketing together to target both the early shoppers and the last-minute hustlers. No matter which marketing channel you choose to focus your holiday budgets on, we’ve got your gift-wrapped tips for success. Keep reading for Snaptech’s essential holiday marketing tips.

Holiday Email Marketing Tips

Emailing your customer base is one of the best ways to kick off the holiday season while it’s still early. While some people absolutely do not want to think about the winter holidays before Halloween, you will have planted the seed in their mind that you are here with things they like that they might want to buy for others. Here are some email marketing tips for the holiday season:

Plan ahead. Proper planning goes a long way. By September, you should have at least outlined a timeline for holiday marketing emails to be going out around now. Remind the early bird shoppers you exist and have the products they need while they’re making their shopping lists.

Get your creatives started. You don’t always have to have new images each year, but it doesn’t hurt to freshen things up from time to time. If your Christmas emails still have images that scream the 90s, it’s time for new ones, regardless of that sweater being back in style now.

Offer incentives. Whether or not you’re planning to get in on Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, consider offering the early shoppers a little incentive to get their shopping started with your business early. Send out small discount codes that can be applied to purchases made in a short time frame in October to capture some early sales before the holiday rush.

Be polite and have a backup plan. One of the best things holiday-themed marketing emails have been doing lately is offering the option of opting out. Not everyone celebrates the holidays, and alienating a customer is not something you want to be doing. The first holiday marketing email you send should always include an opt-out button that puts the customer into a list that will still receive incentives without the holiday messaging. A little thoughtfulness goes a long way in customer retention.

Social Media for Holiday Marketing

Social media can be a lot. Knowing how many hashtags (if any) to use on what platform, the best time to post, the best formats to post in and where. It’s a lot! Luckily, there are tools to help you format your posts for different platforms, save your hashtags, and schedule when posts go live. That way, you’re posting consistently without taking away from your day, and you’re not asking someone to pop in over the holidays to post something for you. You can then use that extra time to respond to followers who have questions about your product, as mentioned in one of our tips below. Check out the rest:

Plan early. Launch early. Just as the early bird gets the worm, the early launch gets the early holiday shoppers. The best time to have your social media content scheduled is now. The second best time is right after you finish this blog. Scheduling your content early allows you to capture early shoppers before the holiday noise hits and your hard work gets lost in the shuffle.

Share gift guides and inspiration. Content for social media doesn’t have to be complicated. Create some simple gift guides using popular stock and share them on social platforms like Instagram and Pinterest to help people with their decision-making. Group your items into themes and offer a variety of guides or lookbooks based on these themes. Not everything needs to be holiday-inspired or useful for the season, either.

Prioritize customer service. Reply quickly to direct messages and comments on your social media. Often shoppers will be asking urgent questions like product availability, shipping, or store hours and will need answers fast. Set up some automated responses, if possible, for hours when you aren’t open. Attentive businesses with helpful customer service will be remembered by customers year-round.

Run festive promos and contests. Keep engagement high with potential customers with flash sales, countdowns, giveaways, or even a “12 Days of Christmas” event. Use small incentives to drive sales and grow your social media base. Boost your account’s visibility with interactive posts that encourage responses (“share the gift you’re most excited to give in the comments”, “follow us, like and share this post to enter our contest”, etc.). And remember to gradually scale back, not drop off, once the season ends to retain your followers.

Holiday Tips for Paid Ads

We have written extensively on Google Ads strategies for the holiday season and paid media tips for the holidays in the past, so much of this will be a refresher. As always, planning ahead of time to launch in October is the best approach. Here are some other helpful tips from the paid media team:

Set a clear objective and choose your channels. Your first step in planning your holiday ad strategy is knowing what you want to get out of it. Whether it’s more website traffic or more sales, make sure your goal is clear. Then, pick the channels you want to advertise on. You’ll know best where your clients are, so you can put your budget where it matters.

Keep your promotions in alignment. If you’re running a social media giveaway, your paid promotions must be launching alongside your posts. Get out your calendar and ensure that your ads are lining up with your posting schedule. There’s nothing worse than mixing up the dates of a sale and leaving customers in the lurch.

Send out reminders with remarketing. People will be shopping around for the best deals at the holidays to stretch their budget as much as possible. Google Ads remarketing campaigns will reconnect you with the ones that got away by sending personalized messages (“you forgot something in your cart”) and incentives (“complete your cart within 24 hours to receive 5% off your total purchase”) to entice them to buy.

Set tracking to see how it’s going. Real-time data allows you to make adjustments on the fly during the holidays. Setting up your tracking and monitoring key metrics keeps you aware of anything that needs ironing out to ensure your holiday season is a success. It’s also useful for gathering data on what went right (and wrong) so you can plan better next year.

Secrets for SEO Seasonal Success

SEO is perhaps one of the more overlooked channels for seasonal marketing due to the time it tends to take for changes to be seen. That doesn’t mean you should count it out, however. For these tips to work, you’ll need a few things to start: year-over-year data, fresh assets, and clear communication with the rest of your marketing team because many of these tips require collaboration with the people working in the previously mentioned channels. Let’s dive in.

Update your Google Business Profile. Double-dip your social media and paid ads messaging with posts on your Google Business Profile. If you’re ecommerce, ensure you’re using the product section of the profile to highlight the products you’re promoting. Create two additional posts: one wishing everyone a happy holiday season, and one to go out on New Year’s Eve, thanking your clients for the past year. Most importantly, update your holiday hours. There’s nothing worse than making plans only to find out a business is closed because its Google Business Profile said it was open.

Use blogs to expand your socials. Social media posts need to be short, sweet, and straight to the point. You can’t spend too much time explaining features and details without falling victim to someone’s short attention span. Linking those social posts to a corresponding blog allows you to wax poetic about your products and provide that extra information people are looking for before they make a purchase.

Create custom landing pages. Just because landing pages tend to fall in paid ads territory doesn’t mean SEO can’t zhuzh it up a bit. Collaborate with your paid media counterparts to create product collections or specific holiday hubs you can both point to in your respective channels. You should also link these pages through your social media posts for 360° coverage. Don’t forget to ensure that your homepage and main navigation menu point to these pages directly to speed up discovery.

Study the data. Look at year-over-year data to see what pages and products did well the previous year. These will be the first places you look into refreshing if they are no longer appearing on the first page of the SERPs. Cross-check with Google Search Console and use the queries to inform any optimizations for the pages. You’ll also want to check what people are currently looking for, as they may have started their holiday gift research early. If the same products that did well last year are still on offer and still in demand, ensure you have adequate stock on hand for both them and similar products.

The Holiday Season Starts Now

We cannot stress enough the importance of starting your holiday marketing campaigns now. Being prepared with your marketing plan early not only gets your business in front of more people, but it’s also less stressful when the holidays do hit–especially if you’re a last-minute shopper yourself. The key points to remember–other than starting early– are to have fresh creatives for use across all channels, your holiday business hours decided, and clear communication with your team so all of these marketing strategies work in harmony. Now that you’re armed with our top marketing tips for the holiday season, what are you waiting for? There are 10 weeks until Christmas!